Aging as Ripening: Character and Consistency of Moral Judgment in Young, Mature, and Older Adults

Abstract

The hypothesis that with maturity moral judgments would become more organized and consistent was studied over the adult life span. 10 men and 10 women in each of three age groups (18–24, 30–50, and 60–75) were interviewed. Both stage levels and philosophical orientations of moral thinking were assessed. Three different tasks were used: Kohlberg’s Moral Judgment Interview, Rest’s Defining Issues Test, and a Story Pair task developed for this study, focused on usage of ‘fairness’ or ‘utilitarian’ philosophical orientation. Results showed few differences in average stage level or orientation among the three age groups. However, consistency between moral stages produced and those preferred by the subject increased markedly with age. So did the consistency of moral orientation usage. These results support a hypothesis of increasing philosophical reflectiveness with maturity.

Consumer Ethics: An Investigation of the Ethical Beliefs of Elderly Consumers

“…This relatively high position on the idealism scale and low one on the relativism scale tends to indicate that the elderly are relatively "ethical" as a group. This result is consistent with the previous research involving age and ethics (Ma 1985 ;Pratt et al 1983 ;Vitell 1986 ) .…”

“…For example, a cross-cultural study by Ma ( 1985 ) found that there was a positive relationship between age and a law-abiding orientation. A study by Pratt et al ( 1983 ) found that older individuals tended to be better organized and more consistent in their moral thinking. They tended to be more philosophically re fl ective than the young.…”

“…This 65-and-over group has been growing at twice the rate of the population as a whole and is projected to reach 64.6 million by the year 2030, accounting for over 21% of the population (French and Fox 1985 ) . Further, since elderly consumers may differ from younger ones in terms of their moral thinking (see Pratt et al 1983 ) , it is important to examine the ethical beliefs of this segment of the population.…”

Does Darker Hide More Knowledge? The Relationship between Machiavellianism and Knowledge Hiding

“…Domelsmith et al (1978) contends Machiavellianism is negatively related to willingness to selfdisclosure for male, while positively for female [20]. Pratt et al (1983) argues that because of generation gap, young people tend to lack the consistency on moral judgement, while old people are more organized and consistent [21]. This means with the increase of age, the old have developed the mature moral judgments.…”

Experiential and Cognitive Sources of Moral Development in Adulthood

“…The advantage in using Kohlberg' s system is that it relies on re sponses to standard moral dilemmas, rather than on idiosyncratic personal dilemmas. This issue of sex differences in moral orienta tions was recently examined by Pratt et al [1983], who found no sex differences for either the fairness or utilitarianism orienta tions. They did not examine the normative or perfectionism orientations.…”